Pat, I don't think it's anything like that bad.
It is also possible for a literal/string to have *no* language, which is
what I'd expect for (say) numbers. (Though there was a suggestion from
outside that no-language matches any language, which I'd oppose to avoid
the kind of confusion you raise.)
I'm not sure what it would mean to write a literal "35"/fr, or whatever,
but I'd assume that would not be in the range of the kinds of datatype we
have been discussing.
Which is just my way of saying what others have said.
#g
--
At 10:25 AM 2/27/02 -0600, you wrote:
>Well, Brian, surely you might have mentioned this before, when the
>datatyping discussion was in full progress, all predicated on the
>assumption (and indeed the frequent explicit assertion, to which nobody
>raised the slightest objection) that literals were strings. If literals
>are not strings, then we have to go and do all that again, because NONE of
>it makes any sense at all. What is the result of applying the
>lexical-to-value mapping of xsd:number to the pair ("34", "french") ? Is
>it the pair (34, "french" ) ? What would that mean ?
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